Award 2011Selection Committee

Ute Meta Bauer

Ute Meta Bauer is a curator of exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video, and sound, with a focus on transdisciplinary formats. Since October 2013 she serves as founding director of the CCA – Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore — a research center of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where she is professor at ADM, NTU’s School of Art, Media and Design. From 2012–2013 she was Professor and Dean of the School of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London. Prior to that appointment she was Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, where she served as the Founding Director of ACT, the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (2009–2012) and as Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program (2005–2009) at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. She was a professor for ten years (1996 – 2006) at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, heading the Institute of Cultural Studies and serving as Vice Rector for International Relations. During her tenure as Founding Director of the Office for Contemporary Art (OCA) in Oslo, Norway (2002-2005), she was also commissioner of the Nordic Pavillion (Norway, Sweden) for the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale (2003) and Norwegian contributor for the Bienal de São Paulo (2004). Furthermore, she was co-director with Hou Hanru of the World Biennial Forum No. 1, Gwangju, South Korea, 2012; Artistic Director of the 3rd Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2004; and Co-Curator of Documenta11 (2001–2002) on the team of artistic director Okwui Enwezor.

Okwui Enwezor

Okwui Enwezor is a Nigerian-born poet, art critic, art historian, and curator who helped bring global attention to African art. Noticing the absence of artists from Africa, Enwezor began writing widely for art magazines and even launched one of his own—Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, founded in 1994 and published in concert with the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. As a curator, Enwezor became known for his work on an exhibit of African photography at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York City in 1996; at the “Africus” Second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997; and as an adjunct curator (1998–2000) of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Later exhibits curated included a group show that traveled through Europe and Canada and a showing of the work of South African photographer David Goldblatt in 2000. A frequent lecturer and member of many art juries, Enwezor also coedited, along with Olu Oguibe, Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (1999). In 2002 Enwezor mounted his first major show, “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994,” at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York. He put into practice his theory of art as an expression of social change when from 1998 to 2002 he was the artistic director of Documenta 11. Enwezor was the first non-European to host the exhibition. He prepared for it with a series of seminars on international issues. He did not shy away from political issues, including globalization, and was understandably comfortable looking beyond American and European traditions into African arts. His emphasis on ideas over objects—in contrast to the “art for art’s sake” philosophy—was evident in his development of the “The Short Century” exhibit, which was also the title of the book that preceded his gallery exhibit in New York City. In 2011 Enwezor became the director of Haus der Kunst, a non-collecting contemporary art museum in Munich and in 2015 Enwezor became the first African curator of the Venice Biennale.

Matteo Lucchetti

Hans-Ulrich Obrist

Hans-Ulrich Obrist has been a member of the 2011 and 2017 Visible selection committee.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist is an art curator, critic and historian of art. He is Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London. Obrist is the author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing project of interviews.